#warhol's factory

[bitter69uk]

“There was something about her. It wasn't necessarily sexuality but a charismatic energy that seemed as much rooted in intelligence as beauty. She seemed completely connected with the moment. There was something international about her. She made everywhere seem like Paris. She had a sweet, expressive face like Monroe but possessed a slim, modern body. She was edgy yet so fresh that even her false eyelashes came off as real.”

/ Punk poetess Patti Smith reflecting on Edie Sedgwick /

Born on this day 82 years ago: doomed, impossibly magnetic Warhol Superstar, underground cinema actress and socialite Edie Sedgwick (Edith Minturn Sedgwick Post, 20 April 1943 – 16 November 1971). I’ll always remember seeing the elfin and adorable Sedgwick in Warhol's short film Outer and Inner Space (1966) at the Institute of Contemporary Art years ago – it was the equivalent of seeing Louise Brooks in Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) for the first time. Pictured: Sedgwick photographed by Bob Adelman at Warhol’s Factory in New York, 1965.

[sleepydrummer]

Andy Warhol exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 📷 by @sleepydrummer

[bitter69uk]

“Mary Woronov burned herself into my brain when, as a college student in 1966, I first saw her smouldering, imperious performance in Andy Warhol’s epic film Chelsea Girls. She was one of the most original, stylish and articulate sexual personae of the royal House of Warhol. I never forgot her, and I followed her subsequent movie career with great fascination … Warholism, which is my philosophy as a critic, merged the visual and performing arts and closed the gap between high and popular culture. Thirty years later, it can be clearly seen that the Warhol Factory, with all its riveting decadent excesses, was as seminal an avant-garde circle as that of the Dadaists and Surrealists after World War I in Paris.”

/ Camille Paglia from the back cover blurb on Mary Woronov’s 1995 autobiography Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory /

Born on this day (8 December 1943): insolent Warhol Superstar turned queen of cult movies, actress, writer, visual artist and recovered amphetamine enthusiast … Mary Woronov! I love the strikingly angular Woronov’s deadpan performances, resting bitch face and witheringly contemptuous voice in Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972) (recommended Christmas viewing), Death Race 2000 (1975), Rock’n’Roll High School (1979), Eating Raoul (1982) and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989). (I just recently caught Woronov in the apex of lurid 1980s exploitation cinema, Hellhole (1985) (tagline: “CAPTIVES … stripped naked. Forced to submit to the ultimate experiment … pray they don’t succeed!”). Even in a cast including Edy Beyond the Valley of the Dolls Williams and Dyanne Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS Thorne, Woronov totally dominates as – what else? – the sadistic villainess). But hell, Woronov is even great value doing guest spots on episodes of Charlie’s Angels (1976) and Murder, She Wrote (1985). One of the best things she ever did was play the mother in punk band Suicidal Tendencies' 1983 video “Institutionalized” (“All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me”). Pictured: cute couple! Woronov with Lou Reed, when she was one of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable stage dancers.

[bitter69uk]

“This was the first time I had ever travelled with Ultra Violet. She was still a big mystery; nobody knew what her scene was – she kept her life very secret (as opposed to everybody else we knew who were always telling you the most intimate things about themselves). I’d met her one day in ’65 when she walked into the Factory in a pink Chanel suit and bought a big Flowers painting that was still wet for five hundred dollars. Her name was Isabelle Collin Dufresne then and she hadn’t dyed her hair purple yet. She had expensive clothes and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and she drove a Lincoln that was the same as the presidential one. She was past a certain age, but she was still beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh. Ultra would do almost anything for publicity. She’d go on talk shows “representing the underground” and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else … she’d tell journalists “I collect art and love.” But really what she collected were press clippings. Gradually we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she’d come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (coincidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York Art world, and then when he died she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet. She was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies.”

/ From POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett /

Born on this day 90 years ago: Warhol Superstar and "art groupie" Ultra Violet (née Isabelle Collin Dufresne, 6 September 1935 – 14 June 2014). She was a true eccentric: there’s a great moment in the 1990 documentary Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol where mid-conversation, Violet pulls a beet out of her handbag, cuts it with a knife and rubs it onto her cheeks like rouge. Pictured: Viva, Andy Warhol and Ultra Violet photographed by Sam Falk, 1968.

[bitter69uk]

“Tally Brown was a magnetic and flamboyant performer, a classically trained vocalist and actress who became who became a Warhol Superstar. On her first visit to Warhol’s silver factory, she fell asleep on the artist’s famous curvy couch during the filming of Batman Dracula (1964) and awoke to find the camera pointed at her … Brown’s talent and powerful stage presence made her a natural fit for Warhol’s circle, and she went on to appear in several of his movies. Brown appreciated that Warhol never “coerced” his stars to do anything but allowed them to “do as much as their compulsions made them.”

/ Text from the Warhol Museum’s exhibit Tally Brown, 2021 /

Born on this day 101 years ago in Brooklyn: outrageous cabaret chanteuse, fringe “outsider actress”, occasional Warhol superstar (she crops up in his films Camp (1965) and Ari and Mario (1966)), show business doyenne, bohemian earth mother, vivid scene-maker in New York’s underground art subculture in the sixties and seventies and all-round diva Tally Brown (1 August 1924 – 6 May 1989). I know it’s virtually impossible to see, but queer New German cinema maverick auteur Rosa von Pranheim’s 1979 documentary Tally Brown, New York is essential viewing. He preserves Brown’s riveting nightclub act (interweaving David Bowie and Rolling Stones tunes with Kurt Weill torch songs and jazz standards) and her personal offstage life. As the title implies, von Praunheim positions flaming creature Brown - a native New Yorker - as the personification of her city’s decayed glamour. And if that’s not enough, Brown’s pal Divine crops up at one point. (Brown jokes about regularly getting mistaken for Divine - and even signing autographs as him). You can find fragments of it on YouTube. Tally Brown was a woman and a half! Pictured: Brown as featured in the film Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers – recently issued on Blu-ray! Read my further reflections here.

[bitter69uk]

Out NOW via Feral House: Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn, author Jeff Copeland’s juicy account of his tempestuous friendship with the outrageous and charismatic sewer-mouthed Puerto Rican-born Warhol superstar, cabaret chanteuse and transgender icon mythologized in the classic 1972 Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side” ("Holly came from Miami F-L-A / Hitchhiked her way across the USA / Plucked her eyebrows on the way / Shaved her legs and then he was a she ..."). When I recently interviewed Copeland for Interview magazine, he reminisced frankly about the woman he considered his “auntie Mame.” Read it here.

[bitter69uk]

“She had a face that was so striking you had the choice of whether to call her beautiful or ugly. I happened to love the way she looked, and I was impressed by all the references she kept dropping to literature and politics. She talked constantly and she had the most tiresome voice I’d ever heard – it was incredible to me that one woman’s voice could convey so much tedium … We all loved Viva; we’d never seen anything like her, and from then on, it was just taken for granted that she’d be in whatever movie we did. She was funny, stylish and photogenic and she gave great interviews … And if a good way to get around the censors was to confuse them, then Viva was perfect for the times, because when she took her clothes off, there was always the question of whether her bony body was a turn-on or -off – the “prurience” was really in question there.”

/ Andy Warhol reminiscing about his leading lady Viva in his 1980 memoirs POPism: The Warhol Sixties /

Born on this day 86 years ago: superbly deadpan, often naked Warhol Superstar and long-term denizen of New York’s bohemian Chelsea Hotel (she now resides in Palm Springs) - Viva (née Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann, 23 August 1938)! I vividly recall watching her in Warhol’s perverse 1968 underground Western Lonesome Cowboys (pictured) at The Scala Cinema in the early nineties. (At the beginning, the theatre was full. By the bitter end, there was only a hardcore of us left!). Outside of Warhol’s films, Viva impressed me as the heavily pregnant groupie Kris Kristofferson picks up in Cisco Pike (1972) and I particularly treasure Viva’s cameo appearance in 1982 cult oddity Forbidden Zone, in which she delivers with peerless nonchalance the killer line, “See you guys later – I need to change a Tampax.”

[bitter69uk]

“This was the first time I had ever traveled with Ultra Violet. She was still a big mystery; nobody knew what her scene was – she kept her life very secret (as opposed to everybody else we knew who were always telling you the most intimate things about themselves). I’d met her one day in ’65 when she walked into the Factory in a pink Chanel suit and bought a big Flowers painting that was still wet for five hundred dollars. Her name was Isabelle Collin Dufresne then and she hadn’t dyed her hair purple yet. She had expensive clothes and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and she drove a Lincoln that was the same as the presidential one. She was past a certain age, but she was still beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh. Ultra would do almost anything for publicity. She’d go on talk shows “representing the underground” and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else … she’d tell journalists “I collect art and love.” But really what she collected were press clippings. Gradually we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she’d come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (coincidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York Art world, and then when he died she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet. She was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies.”

/ From POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett /

In memoriam: Warhol Superstar Ultra Violet (née Isabelle Collin Dufresne, 6 September 1935 – 14 June 2014) died on this day ten years ago. Pictured: portrait of Ultra Violet by Jack Mitchell, 1971.